Gloria Allred's Fighting Spirit

In April, a Saturday Night Live sketch with Tina Fey as a lovestruck teacher and Justin Bieber as her student ended with the teen star's punchline "I'm going to be contacting Gloria Allred!"

The next week, Donald Trump declared his contempt for Allred on The Howard Stern Show while discussing Stern's Tiger Woods Mistress Beauty Pageant.

Online gossip sites are buzzing about such Allred clients as former porn star Joslyn James and nightclub promoter Rachel Uchitel, for whom Allred reportedly helped secure $10 million worth of hush money from the disgraced golfer.

The redoubtable Allred will celebrate her 69th birthday in July, but her notoriety just keeps growing. Long known for her crusades against discrimination — and for her ability to commandeer the spotlight with props ranging from chastity belts to nipple rings (not worn by her) — she has also become the go-to attack attorney for celebrity scandal, a ferocious legal pit bull who defends women against the likes of Charlie Sheen, Eddie Murphy, and Rob Lowe.

Given the inexhaustible supply of wayward males, such cases have won Allred fame, fortune, and a relentlessly busy schedule. It's a balmy Tuesday afternoon, and Allred is grabbing a quick lunch before rushing off to Philadelphia to testify at a hearing on protecting the rights of children in reality TV shows.

Lunch aside, there is nothing chatty about Allred, a partner in the Los Angeles law firm of Allred, Maroko & Goldberg. This is a woman no one in his right mind would trifle with. During her 35-year legal career, Allred has earned a slew of accolades as well as critics. In person, Allred is sporting camera-ready makeup and a fire-engine-red knit jacket. (She has a penchant for St. John.)

Despite her seeming ubiquity, the parade of news-making clients actually represents only a small fraction of Allred's cases, most of which are resolved through undisclosed settlements. "More than 90 percent are confidential," she says. "You don't know about them and never will."

But the ones we know about generate an avalanche of coverage, most of it involving famous names rather than the more substantive issues she also takes as her bailiwick, from sexual abuse by Catholic priests to the cover-up of campus sexual assaults by colleges worried about their image.

"It's not my fault if the media and the public are more interested in Tiger Woods than in women farm workers," says Allred. (In 2008, Allred's firm won a $1.68 million settlement for a group of female farm workers in a gender-discrimination lawsuit.)

There's no doubt about the sincerity of Allred's commitment to female victims — or her identification with them. While working as a department-store buyer, several years before she entered law school, she was paid less than men doing the same job. In 1966, when she was employed as an inner-city schoolteacher, she was raped at gunpoint while on vacation in Mexico. When she had an illegal abortion back in the U.S. for the resulting pregnancy, she almost hemorrhaged to death and developed a fever of 106 from the infection that ensued. While she was in intensive care, a nurse sneered at her, "This will teach you a lesson."

Allred knows all too well how many ways women are made to suffer. "There are endless new variations on how to hurt a woman physically, emotionally, financially, and socially," she says. "I have a passion for justice, and I'm a warrior for change."

She doesn't hesitate to take on male icons, no matter how powerful or beloved. "I'm not an elected official who puts a finger in the wind to see what the majority thinks; I represent women, whether they're popular or not," she says. "In the case of Joslyn James, who had an intimate three-year relationship with Tiger Woods, it's clear to me that he lied to her and broke her heart. I think that he should acknowledge that to her and should apologize, at minimum."

Presumably a big fat monetary settlement would also help assuage hurt feelings, but Allred insists that the important thing is the principle. "I don't accept the idea that a woman should have to suffer in silence," she says.

Allred sees no contradiction in a feminist representing the alleged mistresses of famous men; it's all part of her lifelong crusade for women's rights. "Why this? Why not this?" she replies. "We do many cases simultaneously. I didn't say I could prevent this, but I can make a statement that men need to be accountable for their lives and they'll suffer the consequences if they're not."

Like some of her clients, Allred has had "bad luck with husbands," as her daughter, Lisa Bloom, wrote in her foreword to Allred's 2006 autobiography, Fight Back and Win: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Injustice — and How You Can Win Your Own Battles.

Born in Philadelphia to poor parents who had only eighth-grade educations, Allred attended the University of Pennsylvania, marrying a fellow student her sophomore year. Peyton Bray, her blue-blooded husband, became abusive and had a mental breakdown, and by the time Allred was a senior, she was a divorced single mother. Bray, who suffered from bipolar disorder, eventually committed suicide, and their daughter took her mother's maiden name.

Allred's second marriage lasted longer — she wed businessman William Allred in 1968 and they divorced in 1987 — but when asked if she might ever remarry, she retorts, "Why would I do that?"

But Allred is a doting mother and grandmother, and she is proud of Bloom, a divorced attorney, mother of two, and legal analyst for CNN and CBS News. Often asked what it was like to grow up as Gloria Allred's daughter, Bloom always answers with one word: "Empowering."

Having empowered her own daughter and countless other women, Allred wants only to continue doing so. "Male privilege and entitlement are dying a very painful death; no one gives up power without a struggle," she says. "I live in a war zone, and sometimes it can get very ugly behind the scenes. But the good news is that women are fighting back — and they are winning."

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